Posts in category Minecraft Moments

So a few days ago I noticed the Canary community site was no longer accessible. It’s happened before so I wasn’t too concerned until another community member emailed me and said the current team was abandoning the project. Rusli reached them and confirmed this verdict. Other than the Christmas season, this is about the worst time of year for me to deal with this because of all the volunteer work I do in July. Fortunately it’s just a few more weeks and then I can focus my attention back on BriarCraft, and now Canary.

What we know

The current Canary team has indeed decided to discontinue their support. Please don’t ask me why. Even if I did know (trust me I know very little), it really wouldn’t be polite of me to go around being their personal spokesperson. To be honest, we should consider ourselves fortunate that they contributed so much, for so long, with very little benefit. They really were a group of very bright guys that had to deal with a lot of crap for very little return. So I personally thank them for that much even if I was, maybe a little irritated, at how the whole thing went down. They’re just human and I’m sure they didn’t mean to be evil tyrants or anything like that. In any case, they’ve at least put up an official announcement now and they’ve generously agreed to try to keep things available for the time being. This includes (hopefully) access to the Maven repos, current plugins and user documentation. People can currently still access about everything else they need at the following sources….

What Next?

I’ve temporarily set up a Google discussion group for anyone interested in discussing an interest in seeing Canary continued. I wouldn’t say that anyone has officially stepped up and offered to take the lead on this. I’ve been trying to facilitate and organize any efforts, but I don’t have the expertise required to make decisions specific to any development decisions. A few people are already there discussing options and starting to setup a new infrastructure. If the community does decide to continue, we’re going to need to reestablish all the existing infrastructure. It’s not logical to assume that we can continue to support something we don’t have complete access to. Nor is it fair to assume that the team leaving will want to continue to financially support something that they’ve abandoned for very long.

Based on current discussions, here’s what I understand the needs are and status for that infrastructure:

A new community interface (website, forums, plugin mgmt) – need a development person to support, need a location and software to host.

GitHub official presence – Easily forked off of existing

Continuous integration platform/hosting – Rusli has nearly completed setting this up on BinTray to work with Gradle (not very compatible with Maven, sorry)

Development Team – The most important element. We need Canary subject matter experts, web support, software testers, plugin developers, a leader and most importantly… people willing to get their hands dirty in the Canary code to finish 1.8 and prepare for 1.9 deployment.

Community Support – Canary needs you to speak up. Provide honest feedback on what would make Canary better, offer solutions, be willing to be a contributor.

For the latest in what’s going on, be sure to follow the discussion on our Google group. I’ll also have periodic updates here.

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